Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says that Apple did not need NeXT, the company that provided the foundation for Mac OS X; he argues that System 7 wasn't nearly as bad as it was made out to be. Wozniak also says that Mac OS 9 was more secure than OS X is now: Mac OS X is built in Unix and is therefore more prone to attacks because people are familiar with the holes in Unix, explained Woznaik. "Some of the holes in Unix are well known. So keeping Firewalls on is more important. And we keep announcing, even our own security fixes, not as many as Microsoft but still we never really had those in the OS 9 days."

What We Did and Why -- To prepare for the Crack A Mac contest, we simply unpacked a standard Power Macintosh 8500/150 from its box. Then we installed WebSTAR 2.0 (the popular Macintosh Web server from StarNine), upgraded to Open Transport 1.1.2, connected the machine to the Internet, and put some Web pages on it. We didn't do anything special with the server - it wasn't behind a firewall, and we didn't make any other security arrangements.

The article is pretty interesting in how people attempted to crack the server unsuccessfully.